THE EFFECTS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE ON HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT
Bobbi Faulkner
Reading Education, General LRE 080-Classroom Clinical, Master of Arts
FDN 5000: Summer 2006
June 20, 2006
(IRB approval needed)
INTRODUCTION:
This study will investigate the effects of domestic violence on high school students’ academic achievement. This study is significant because it can help educators achieve greater success in reaching and teaching all children regardless of home life, and it might provide educators with a warning sign that things aren’t quite right in the home of a fledgling student.
RESEARCH QUESTION:
What is the effect of domestic violence on high school student’s academic achievement?
KEY WORDS:
- domestic violence
- children
- educational achievement
RELATED RESEARCH:
Investigating the effects of domestic violence on high school students is a study of significance for several reasons. First, as educators, we are constantly pressured (and indeed it is our duty) to enhance student achievement. In fact, in the state of North Carolina, the ABCs of education (as well as the federal mandate No Child Left Behind), makes teachers legally accountable for student achievement. Thus, it is important to understand all the issues that might affect a student’s achievement level, in addition to learning ability. This study would help educators better understand students with low achievement, and would in turn help them to better meet students’ needs and raise student achievement. Educators would gain a deeper understanding of students who traditionally might have “fallen between the cracks” and could attempt to educate the whole child if we knew more about how certain factors affected achievement level. Also, if low student achievement is indeed a result of domestic violence, that would provide educators with a “symptom” to watch for, thus enabling the educator to better watch out for student welfare and to get families the help they need dealing with internal problems before it is too late. After reviewing the literature, the need for studying the effects of domestic violence on high school students became especially apparent because as Foreman (1994) laments, few studies have been done on the effects of domestic violence on student achievement; rather, the focus has been on studying the effects of domestic violence on student behavior. This dearth of research in the area still holds true more than a decade later.
Research findings on the effects of domestic violence on student achievement have proved inconsistent. Some researchers have reported that domestic violence did not affect a student’s cognitive level (Head Start, 2006). However, this study on the effectiveness of Head Start did report findings that parents who were experiencing domestic violence in the home tended to be more depressed, and children of depressed parents were more problematic behaviorally, more aggressive, more hyperactive, and showed less cognitive outcomes in the areas of one-to-one counting, early math activities, and creativity. Therefore, the findings are inconsistent. If depression is correlated to domestic violence and if children of depressed families have lower cognitive function, then it follows that children exposed to domestic violence may have lowered cognitive functions. Strauss(1990) proposed that children who witness domestic violence as a result experience learning problems. Also, Wildin, Williamson, and Wilson (1991) conducted a study that explored the academic achievement of primary grades children who witnessed domestic violence and found that “a high rate (46%) of the parents reported academic problems, including grade repetition, failing grades, and a need for special school services” (p. 299). Foreman conducted a study in middle school aimed at providing remediation for the family and the students who were victims of domestic violence and to test the effects this remediation had on student achievement. She found that the 12-week period her study was conducted in was not enough time to make significant gains. However, the anecdotal evidence her study provided is that 12 of the 20 students identified at this metropolitan middle school as being victims of domestic violence had a “D” or an ‘F” in at least one subject. Interestingly, 20 out of 55 students referred to Foreman for low academic performance were victims of domestic violence (1994).
The purpose of this study is to see how domestic violence specifically affects the academic achievement of high school students because there seems to be a lack of such research, and high school is my area of interest. The literature leads me to propose that children who are victims of domestic violence will have decreased academic achievement.
METHOD:
Sample:
The sample will consist of eighty high school students, grades 9-12. These students range in age from thirteen to nineteen. They are from a rural high school, population approximately 1100, composed of mostly working class families. The majority of the students’ parents are either long time employees of local furniture factories or are unemployed due to ongoing plant closings. The members of this population are of mixed ethnicities: Caucasian, African American, Hispanic, Hmong, and multi-racial, primarily. The sample will be chosen using pair-wise matching, if possible. According to Gay & Airasian (2003), this method controls to help ensure that each group has similar participants based on extraneous variables—variables that aren’t being tested. I want to make sure these extraneous variables don’t contribute to the causal relationship and therefore lead to internal validity issues (342). My criteria for selecting the sample would be that forty students would experience domestic violence in the home (10 from each grade). Forty will not be exposed to domestic violence, and furthermore, their IQs and grade in school will be similar to those in the domestic violence group. My first step in collecting the sample would be to contact the guidance counselor for each grade level for recommendations. Theoretically and ideally, the guidance counselors would be aware of students with domestic violence problems at home. Therefore, I would begin by getting participants for Group 1, the group with the independent variable of domestic violence. I would have guidance counselors make recommendations of students that they suspect or know witness domestic violence. Then, I would have the guidance counselors administer an instrument (described in detail in procedures) to ascertain that the students chosen were indeed victims of domestic violence. Ideally (for research purposes only, not because I condone domestic violence), I would be able to identify 10 students per grade level, for a total of forty. If this number could not be found at the chosen school, I would also look at a neighboring high school in the same county and of very similar makeup. Then, I would et the IQ score of all members of the first group, so that in picking the second group of students who did not witness domestic violence, I could match for that factor and would be bale to compare students of similar IQs to be sure that the differences were related to witnessing domestic violence or not, rather than related to IQ.
Instruments:
- Students’ current GPA 9grade point average) as reported by the school
- Students EOC scores in relevant areas: English I, 10th grade writing, Algebra I, US History, Government and Economics, and other state tested areas.
- The first domestic violence screening instrument would be completed by the parents of the students to be included in the study. The Abusive Behavior Inventory (ABI) measures the physical and psychological abuse of women by their partners and is comprised of 30 items that the victim and the abuser respond to. There are 10 physical abuse questions and 20 psychological abuse questions. This instrument uses a Likert scale to measure the frequency of abuse and abusive behaviors during a six-month period. ABI has good reliability, criterion-related validity, and construct validity (Shepard & Campbell, 1992).
- The second screening instrument will also be administered to parents, but this time to the male because men can also be victims of domestic violence and the purpose of this study is to determine the effects of domestic violence on student achievement regardless of whether the violence is male to female or female to male. This instrument is the Hurt-Insult-Threaten-Scream (HITS) screening tool. It is a simple instrument to be used in clinical settings as a way of determining the presence of domestic violence. This instrument uses a five point Likert scale to determine the frequency of being physically hurt, threatened, insulted, or screamed at by one’s partner within a twelve-month period. This instrument has strong reliability and validity for both men and women (Shakil, Smith, Sinacore, & Krepcho, 2005).
Procedure:
First, after IRB approval and revisions as necessary, I would approach the guidance counselors for each grade level with a cover letter explaining n brief the research, its significance, the procedures, and what I hoped to gain from conducting the study. After gaining entrance into the research setting, I would ask the counselors to identify students whom they thought or knew were experiencing domestic violence in their home lives. Then, I would secure the permission of these parents to use their child in my study, and I would also need the consent of the parents themselves to participate in the study. It would be important to explain to parents that participating in this study would not legally incriminate them, although we would put the participants in touch with services such as counseling and anger management classes to help them deal with and overcome the issues related to domestic violence. Of course, the results would be confidential. The next step would be for the guidance counselors of each grade level to call in the parents of each prospective student participant and administer the ABI to ascertain if, indeed, domestic violence is a factor in their household. Also, at the same time because the second instrument is so brief, the men in the relationship would complete the HITS screening tool, to ascertain if the male is a victim of domestic violence in the relationship.
If domestic violence is found to be present, then that student would be a participant in the study. Hopefully, we would identify 10 students per grade level. The next step would be to use the matching method to pick the students to participate in the other group. I would first get a list of IQs for students selected for the domestic violence group. In each grade level, I would select a child who was not suspected of experiencing domestic violence with an IQ close to a child of the same grade level that does experience domestic violence and so on, until I had forty members in each group who were similar on the basis of grade level and IQ. Ideally, we would be able to find a match of the same gender as well. The reason I want to have equal members from each grade is to control for thee fact that students mature as they get older and might have higher achievement. If I can’t match these three elements (gender, grade and IQ) then the priority will be IQ matches first, then grade level, and finally gender.
Using this method of selecting participants, I will be able to compare students’ achievement at each grade level. Once students with similar IQs are identified, their parents too will be given the domestic violence screenings to be sure that the students in Group 2 do not witness domestic violence. If someone is involved as abuser or victim in domestic violence, that student will not participate in the study.
Once all participants are selected, I will immediately gather the following information for high school only: current cumulative GPA and results from EOCs (if any) taken in high school. Then, using one-way ANOVA, the data would be analyzed for a .05 significance level.
ANALYSIS:
Hypothesis: Null: There is no statistically significant difference between academic achievement (average GPA and average number of students at or above grade level on End of Course tests (EOCs) of two groups of high school students classified as having “been exposed to domestic violence” and “not having been exposed to domestic violence.”
Directional hypothesis: A group of high school students classified as having “been exposed to domestic violence” will have statistically lower academic achievement (low average GPA, low average number of students at or above grade level on EOCs) than a group of high school students from the same school classified as having “not been exposed to domestic violence.”
Research Design:
I will be using a casual-comparative research design in this study due to ethical concerns. Based on my reading of Gay and Airasian (2003), the casual-comparative design is best suited to this study due to the fact that causing harm to participants is not ethical. I will not be applying a treatment. Instead, the groups have been formed prior to this study. It would not be ethical (nor would it be feasible) for me to conduct true experimental research on this topic of domestic violence: it would not be possible for me to randomly select participants and then decide that one group will not experience domestic violence in the home and another one will. Therefore, the casual-comparative design is the one best suited for exploring this research question. Furthermore, I will be conducting prospective casual-comparative research because I will start with the cause (domestic violence) and explore the effects on achievement (337-344). The major potential threat to validity associated with this design is differential selection of participants, or the idea that these two comparison groups were already different before the study begins (361). To minimize the potential effects of this threat to internal validity, I will use pair-wise matching to make the groups as similar as possible.
Operational Definitions:
Domestic violence: “an act carried out with the intention or perceived intention of physically hurting another person. This violence refers to the classic forms of violence towards wives, children, sibling violence and violence towards parents. Finally, violence can occur between those who share a domestic relationship by virtue of sharing the same household” (Gelles, 1990, p. 22). The author would like to add to this definition that domestic violence can also be violence towards the husband. Domestic violence is the independent variable in this study because I propose to investigate it as a cause of low academic achievement.
Academic achievement: The operational definition of academic achievement is performance on academic achievement tests (Cunningham, 2003). The author would like to add that academic achievement is successfully completing classes. By “successful,” I will explain in my operational definitions of low and high academic achievement. Academic achievement (GPA, test scores on EOCs) is the dependent variable in this study.
Low academic achievement: A GPA of less than a 2.0, and not at grade level on one or more EOC. (Both of these criteria must be met to classify a child as having low achievement because a student could make one C or fail one course or not pass one EOC in isolation but may still experience moderate academic success.
Moderate academic achievement: A GPA of higher than 2.0 and at grade level on all EOCs.
High academic achievement: GPA of 3.00 or higher, above grade level on almost all EOCs.